“Cat”

I came back thinking I have something to write about, but when I wrote this sentence I had completely forgotten what I actually had in mind. The train of thought that stopped, the passengers disembarked, the engines left to rust and the railroad discontinued, swallowed by foliage. All I have is the empty station, suggestive and nostalgic, but deserted.

But I came back and turned on this Vaio (the computer is still put out of commission, and I hadn’t sent the GPU back for repairs), and the first thing I wrote was Cat.

And then I wrote nothing else. For a full hour. I went and locked the doors, let the poodle into the room, listened to Battle Studies and chatted with Teh Ais, and when I returned to the word document, Cat sat at the top of it, with nothing else below.

So I wrote this, knowing that it’ll come back to me if I did.

It didn’t, so now I know I wasn’t knowing.

Now I figure it isn’t going anywhere. And I suppose that I should stop.

But Cat. Cat’s still there.

Cat sits in a picture where the overexposed light from the window ate away a corner of the world, and the underexposed shadows clung to her face and body and chair, leaving only a silhouette.

Cat probably didn’t know that her picture was taken. But now that it is, she took it, and kept it.

We don’t know who the photographer is. Or whether the effect was intentional or otherwise. At the very least, probably unbeknownst to him/her, that picture was the truest picture ever taken.

Maybe that’s why Cat kept it. Because it was a true picture of her. That the light of the world will only darken her shadow, so that we can only make her out in shapes, but never really her.

Cat had probably relished in this. Or maybe she grieved. Or maybe it was such a perfect reflection that she kept it as a reminder, of things good and bad.

Or that is what I think of Cat. Cat obviously does not think of any of this. Cat will most likely think the proper way of thinking; that it is a picture of her, and that she likes it.

It just so happen that this picture of Cat was on my mind, for no apparent reason aside from the fact that I was reminded of it as I took overexposed pictures of a minister, in a feast I have no reason to be a part of, only forced to, by an act of filial piety.

And it just got me in a pointless, completely incoherent train of thought that stopped and emptied out and faded away along with the railroads when the people forgot about it...

Ah, it came back.

Now, to write it down...